Right now I am taking an online course about organising with Christina at http://SimpleOrganizingSolutions.com I am working on making orgainsation fun. It isn’t always a chore. I have learned to break it down into bite size, manageable pieces.
The kids share a book shelf and each child has 2 shelves for their own stuff. For the last few months, everything I ask them to put away, has been added on top of everything else on their shelves. It has become a pile of stuff. Not very organised. Yesterday, we decided that they need to clean it out. Since it always seems like a daunting task, we decided to break it down into 2 different tasks. One shelf per day. So what do you know, they sorted everything on one shelf yesterday. Took them quite a while, considering there was so much paper to go through, sheets and sheets of drawings. The recycling bin was full. All that artwork. So today the other shelf with other things was done, everything was organised. They got rid of things they didn’t need and put others away instead of just dumping it on their shelf.
They feel good about it, it looks so much neater and they will find thing easier. The trick now is to keep them motivated to keep the shelf clean. Most of the time they don’t look at their drawing again. Matthew has a binder of drawings he wants to keep but that is already full. Now is his decision on how to keep every tidy.
Yes they can keep their space clean, don’t try and it it in one sitting, not fun spending the whole day cleaning. Just one bit at a time.